


The Before, After, and Forever

by makkachincrossing



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Anal Sex, Character Study, Drug Use, M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-02-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:15:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22313902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/makkachincrossing/pseuds/makkachincrossing
Summary: “The attack at The Met… That wasn’t the first explosion it had survived.”“No?”“No, a gunpowder factory exploded nearby Fabritius’ studio, killing him and destroying nearly all of his paintings,” I took a breath, unsteady. “But The Goldfinch… The Goldfinch survived.”A hand on my shoulder. Long fingers, a firm squeeze, grounding me to earth. “You survived too, Potter.”I looked to him, eyes aching behind my glasses.“Life exploding around you. You survived. You, too, are Goldfinch.”
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 18
Kudos: 223





	1. Chapter 1

I still remember the first time it happened. Clearer than a dream, but foggier than most of my realities, sober or otherwise. A private memory, not even fully preserved in my countless notebooks and scribblings over the lengthening years of my life; my deteriorating youth. Mine alone to accompany me in my solemn bed, hand wrapped around myself as I whisper the name of my first. Mine alone as I thrust into the warm cavity of a moaning woman, her name on my lips but another entirely in my mind.

Boris.

I woke with a start, nearly 30 years old and on a train from Frankfurt, to Dusseldorf, to Rotterdam, to The Hauge with the image of a 16 year old sawtoothed spine rising under the near-translucent skin of a wiry, unwashed, hungover Ukranian boy. I fixed my glasses straight on my face and looked around the cabin. Nobody was staring. The obscene noises I had been making in the realm of dreams, thankfully, hadn’t leaked over into reality.

Instinctively, I patted the breast of my suit jacket, finding with relief that my passport was still safely tucked there. Though years had passed since that feverish Christmas in Amsterdam, my anxiety would not let the idea of losing my passport go every time I traveled out of the country. Memories of deathly illness, overdose, an explosion of blood and fragments of skull, a fog of overdose, Dutch newspapers I failed to understand, and extreme cold always grip me. To this day, I still can’t stomach room-service food.

I didn't miss Amsterdam, and was thankful that I would be an hour south of it on that particular trip. The man that I had not seen since the last time I was in The Netherlands extended the invitation to me, informally, via the texts we sent each other, infrequently.

_Come see me, Potter. I want to show you something._

Of course I knew what he wanted me to see. Since he called the police and rescued it, The Goldfinch had been in the safe possession of Mauritshuis, at home with its brother and sister masterpieces.

Safe, but always mine.

I had told Boris that I needed to buy back a piece from Hobart and Blackwell at premium in Rotterdam. It was only an hour’s train ride from The Hauge. The truth was the piece had been in the southern German Alps, a vacation home of a wealthy customer. I then boarded the train early that morning for an 8 hour train ride, and indulged in the new notebook and pen I’d bought. Always, always, writing thoughts.

I suppose I’ll never get used to completely telling the truth, even when someone would be flattered to hear such things, like me traveling so far out of my way across several countries to be with them. Boris would be thrilled to know, I’m sure. Though he knew nearly everything about me, he didn’t need to know it all.

Especially the way I nearly told him I loved him the last time I saw him in Las Vegas, how I always tasted the words on my tongue around him, especially when the painkillers we sucked up with yellow-striped McDonald’s straws made them tingle so sweetly there. How the vodka we used to drink threatened to make me vomit them up along with the contents of my stomach.

I rose my head from the window as I felt the train beginning to slow, the speaker overhead talking in scratched Dutch. I did understand “Den Haag”, and gathered my coat and bag into my arms, as did those around me.

The diamond-patterned glass ceiling cast hatched darkness onto the platform, where Boris had carefully positioned himself in the shadows, in the middle of an X. The light never did suit him. His hair was too dark, his skin too delicate, the bruises under his eyes too sensitive. Even in the slight shade, he was squinting at the sunlight under his untrimmed bangs.

The elation at the sight of him. The sweet taste of unspoken words on my tongue.

“Potter!” He greeted me, smile finding his eyes, dark as a desert night sky. His curls were shining, healthy, cared for like he never did as a young man. When we embraced, I breathed him in. So deeply familiar and comforting, so wholly human, and a hint of spiced cologne that was unfamiliar but welcome. The memories of holding each other in bed as teenagers always came flooding back, and the tang of vodka on his laughter let me know he’d started drinking without me.

When he let me go, he took hold of my left wrist and held my hand up to the light. His fingernails were still bitten to the quick, hangnails bloody and peeled around his cuticles. “No ring?” He asked with happy astonishment.

“No,” I shook my head, looking to my shoes. “No ring. I told you, it’s over with me and Kitsey.”

He laughed again. “I thought you would have gone crawling back when she begged you, realizing that cigarette asshole was nothing compared to you!”

“Nah, we’re done. Just friends now.”

“Men and women can never just be friends, Potter, you know this.” Boris said as he lifted his own left hand to see his bare ring finger. “Divorce.”

“Oh,” I couldn’t hide my shock, almost as palpable as when I learned he was married in the first place. “Boris, I’m so sorry.”

“There was another husband,” he said. “Kids turned out weren’t mine, either. He showed up while I was visiting and…” he shrugged. I didn’t care for him to elaborate. “Well! It’s boys' time, then!” He slapped my back so hard I stumbled. “Like old times, Boris and Potter!” I followed him to the car, waiting for us by the curb. God, I hoped so. I needed those old times. Boris and Potter.

As always, Gyuri was there to tote Boris around in a car wherever he pleased, wherever he may be in the world. I sat as calmly as I could in the back seat beside Boris, looking out the window. I was keenly aware that he was looking at me, but determined not to let my face or ears heat in response. “You ever been to _Den Haag_ , Potter?” He asked, breaking the silence between us.

“No, though my mother talked about how it was her dream to go to Mauritshuis. See the Dutch masterworks,” I turned back to the window. “At least she saw them the day she died.”

“Ah, at The Met. Yes.”

“Right. Mauritshuis was being remodeled so they took their permanent collection on tour.” The familiar feeling of anxiety and blaming started coiling in my stomach again. If they hadn’t remodeled the museum, if they hadn’t taken the paintings to New York, maybe she…

“Your bird lives here, and we are going to go visit.”

“I guessed that’s what you invited me for,” I smiled at him. God, it was so good to see him again. There was always a place in my heart that was so empty when he wasn’t near.

“I’m sure it has missed you,” and Boris put a hand on my knee. I felt his emotion without him saying a thing, and I put my hand on top of his. _I missed you, too._

“No, I doubt it.” All I did was keep it locked away for years upon years, in the dark where nobody could appreciate it and in less-than-pristine conditions for a priceless artwork to exist in. And fuck, I was nervous to see it. After all this time, what emotions would be stirred by seeing it again? All I knew was that I needed a drink to sedate me enough into being ready to glance upon it again. It was good that I could count on Boris to swing into a bar before doing much of anything to get drunk enough with me to survive out in the real world with anyone.

That was, until the car pulled up and stopped outside of a creamy 17th century building, seemingly floating on top of the water. Flags advertising _The Girl With the Pearl Earring_ and a current exhibition featuring the works of Rogier van der Weyden. My stomach gave an upsetting lurch. We couldn’t be here already. “Is this it?”

“Of course,” Boris opened his door, looking back at me. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I thought, uh, we would get drinks or something.” I was keenly aware of the sweat around my neck and hairline as the cool breeze from the open door touched it.

“Sorry, trying to cut back. Astrid made me see doctor before I left. Told me my liver is shit,” he said. I could have told him that, and I was sure that my liver was just as bad, if not worse. I felt selfishly offended that he couldn’t put aside one day of holding back when his old friend was in town and clearly needed a crutch. “Come on,” he told me, slamming the door behind him. When I still didn’t get out, he walked around to my side of the car and opened the door. “Are you scared?”

“Of course I’m scared. Why wouldn’t I be scared?”

“Because I’m with you, Potter,” he smiled. “There’s nothing to fear. Your bird missed you and you need to see it.” Boris held out his hand for me.

I still regret not taking his hand. Instead, I pushed myself out of the car, reached into my pocket for my tin tobacco case and crunched two Oxycontin tablets between my teeth. If Boris felt defeated, he didn’t show it and simply tucked his hands into the pockets of his coat.

Through my haze of panic, I failed to notice what a gentleman he was being to me. He paid for the price of both or our admissions, and walked around with me slowly as we waited for the drugs to work. We took our time with the paintings I had only seen in the art books in my mother’s collection and the ones she brought home from the library.

I could feel her with me… I only went to art museums with her and here, in the first one I had been in since the day I lost her, I felt her guiding me. I saw her spirit in _The Girl With the Pearl Earring_ , though my mother was never able to be captured in still life, at least in photographs. If only a master had painted her, then perhaps she could hang in a museum herself for all to adore as she deserved. I felt the tug in my heart as we looked at _The Anatomy Lesson_ , the painting that she had gone back to see before the blast. It had survived unscathed, while the woman who gazed upon it had not.

Just as I thought I was ready, just as I thought the drugs had built up enough courage inside me, we turned through a doorway. Tucked between two windows on a wall of its own, sunlight streaming in, flanked by olive curtains, was _The Goldfinch_. I nearly stumbled over my own feet to get nearer to it, feeling a rush of affection for the chained little bird I hadn’t felt in years.

Tears built in my eyes as I stared at it. I could have sworn the paint was brighter under this light than all of the daylight, incandescent light and fluorescent light I had ever seen it under. It had been cleaned and restored after Mauritshuis had gotten it back home, of course. No matter how I tried to protect it, I’m sure it suffered in my incapable but loving hands. I longed to feel the weight of it in my arms, feel the wood under my fingertips as I caressed the back, holding the painting to my chest. To stare, privately, endlessly, at the brushstrokes as closely as I liked without a security guard watching me.

“Look at the way the wing was painted,” I finally spoke, trying to hide my embarrassment at the crack in my voice. “He painted the yellow over the black, then scratched the stripe down the middle with the sharp end of his brush while the paint was still wet– a trick he learned from Rembrandt.”

Boris nodded out of the corner of my eye, quietly, his hands in his pockets. It looked as if he hadn’t been looking at the painting at all not a moment before I noticed– he’d been looking at me. “The attack at The Met… That wasn’t the first explosion it had survived.”

“No?”

“No, a gunpowder factory exploded nearby Fabritius’ studio, killing him and destroying nearly all of his paintings,” I took a breath, unsteady. “But _The Goldfinch_ … _The Goldfinch_ survived.”

A hand on my shoulder. Long fingers, a firm squeeze, grounding me to earth. “You survived too, Potter.”

I looked to him, eyes aching behind my glasses.

“Life exploding around you. You survived. You, too, are Goldfinch.”


	2. Chapter 2

I couldn’t help but feel I was being romanced the rest of the day. Boris followed me through several antiques stores as I babbled about Dutch furniture making, pointing out techniques they had brought to American colonial furniture when they immigrated over from Europe. His eyes never looked glazed with boredom, and he even asked me to elaborate or clarify what I had been saying with genuine interest. He was happy when I’d found the perfect gift for Hobie, an 18th century Dutch chess set and board that had once been attached to a table. When the sun set, dined on oysters and pheasant and bass, and each had a glass of champagne to toast to our meeting again. When it began to rain, we ran laughing to the shelter of the hotel.

The hotel room he’d reserved for me was just as beautiful as the one he’d gotten me in Amsterdam. I couldn’t help but stare out into the darkness through the large picture window. Light reflected off Hofvijver, and I could see Mauritshuis and its warm windows right across the lake through driving sheets of rain. _The Goldfinch_ and I hadn’t slept so close since it was taped behind my headboard in Las Vegas. Part of me wished that we could be that close again, but I knew I could never care for it the way Mauritshuis could. _The Goldfinch_ was made of light, and I could only give it darkness. I caught my reflection in the mirror. A portrait of a young man, drifting.

“You look wistful,” Boris said behind me. I turned to look at him, realizing I hadn’t heard him enter the room again.

I couldn’t help but chuckle, putting my hands into the pockets of my jacket. “Wistful, huh?”

“Yes,” he showed me the screen of his phone, an English dictionary app. “Adjective, having or showing a feeling of vague or regretful longing.”

“I never said you were wrong,” I told him as I approached. He had returned from the downstairs bar with a bottle of red wine (instinctually, my damaged mind shot _Pippa’s favorite_ into my thoughts. Old trauma, old obsessions, never gone.)“Your English is getting better.”

“Well, you say you study Russian in college for me, I study English for you.”

I smiled at that, watching as he twisted the corkscrew into the unopened bottle. “You’re full of shit.”

“Why would I be full of shit?” A tug, pop, and red splattered onto the dark patterned carpet, becoming nearly invisible. Exactly why the designers chose the carpet they did, I thought.

“You know a lot of people who speak English, not just me.”

“What if I want to tell you more things than I want to tell other people?” He poured the wine glasses full to the brim, not stopping when someone who might be considered normal may stop.

I grinned wider, feeling naturally high by his intoxicating presence. “What do you want to tell me, then?”

I didn’t expect to get silence in return. Something witty and quipped, yes– not the quiet way he looked to the wine glasses and took them carefully into his hands. Maybe he truly didn’t have the words for whatever he needed to say in the only language we shared. It made me long for a better hold in Russian, and the responsibility as a younger man to have worked harder at it for the sake of this single moment.

Boris handed me the nearly-spilling glass of wine, leaning on the desk beside the window. He reached into his pocket for the golden case I’d seen only a few times, but knew intimately. The night of our fated reunion, doing lines upon lines and washing them down with vodka in the back of his car, circling the city.

Boris’ vice of choice, and a rare enough occurrence for me. Cocaine was turning out to be something that I did with him alone, our own private universe.

“You want Blow, Potter?” And just like that, he’d changed the subject. Fuck, did I ever. As a consequence I didn’t have the heart to tell him that coke was going to probably kill him faster than vodka would. He crushed pills from a little bag on the gilded lid, formed them into four military rows like good soldiers. We took turns snorting them up, laughing when they disappeared so fast it was like they were never there. Our wine glasses emptied, and we abandoned them and passed the bottle between us and shared a cigarette.

The hotel room shimmered in front of my eyes like a sweltering summer day. Jackets, shoes and socks were tossed away in the heat-fog from dry wine and bumps of coke. My body and thoughts were lighter than air, a helium balloon let go and drifting high above the stifling concrete and steel New York skyline.

“You know what I was thinking about on the train?” I heard the sound of my voice, felt it drift carelessly out of my lips. Warm, like bathwater flowing from a tap.

Boris laughed at my side, laying on the bed and holding the cigarette beautifully between two long fingers. “Tell me your thoughts, Potter.”

“Being in bed with you,” I started to laugh, making him join me even harder.

“I never thought you would do so!” Boris took a drag off the cigarette, lips smiling around the filter, and snubbed the butt out in the ashtray. “You always act like nothing happened in the morning. We just go to school like nothing.” He made a motion like he was tossing aside a newspaper he’d finished with passive interest.

“It was crazy! We did crazy shit back then.”

“I got impression that you think that when I brought it up at the bar when we met again.” His smile had changed, something behind his dark eyes was glittering, swimming in the high.

I watched him stand, step over to the desk to light another cigarette. I made to drink another swallow of wine, but found the bottle empty when I rose it to my lips. “What, you don’t think it’s crazy?”

“Not as crazy as all the Vicodin we did, chasing it with vodka and beer. Dropping acid when we got hands on it. Shoplifting all the time, running from cops. You crying about wanting to die, wishing a car would hit you.” He took a deep breath of smoke from the cigarette, lungs filling, chest widening. Exhale. Smoke like desert thunderstorms to the west that would never come our way. “I wanted fun, you needed release. Orgasm was good for both of us and girls didn’t like us then.” He shrugged. “Not so crazy when you think.”

I’d hurt him. I sat up straighter. “We were kids. We were just messing around. You said yourself, boys that age do that sometimes.” Something I told myself often, trying to justify it to myself.

“Confused boys, wanting sex, wondering about their own kind,” he sat on the bed, heavily, not offering the cigarette to me; this one wasn’t shared. “I felt strongly for you. I saw you undress for the pool, was fascinated how the hair below was darker than the hair on your head.”

“Fuck,” I’d snorted instinctually, like I was trying to laugh or cough away the conversation. I practically sprang to my feet to get myself my own cigarette.

“See, you do it again!” He raised his hands out in front of him, gesturing to me in disbelief.

“I didn’t do a fucking thing,” my hands were trembling as I held the cigarette to my lips and lit it with my Zippo.

“You avoid this, laugh it off. Hide it like the painting behind your bed.” Boris stood too, more level with my own eyes. His cheeks and ears were flaming red from our indulgences. “Do you never talk about sex with your lovers? Is it really so strange?”

“We’re not lovers!”

“We used to be!”

“Fuck you. We weren’t. We were just kids messing around. You said it– you said it yourself.” The familiar feeling of anxiety coiled itself around the sparkling high, taking it away from me, into the grey buzzing leaving me untethered as the drugs continued to work.

“I know what I said, and maybe it was because I was scared too, then,” Boris looked at me, no fear in his eyes. “All suddenly, my most important person back in my life. I could not believe that you would even speak to me after I switched your bird. After that terrible wrong I did you!”

He was close enough that I could smell the sharp odor of wine and burned tobacco on his words. “Fuck, slow down!” I squeezed my eyes shut, tinnitus ringing in my bad ear. 

“I cared about you, Potter!” he yelled, and I rose my hands up to hold my head. “Why did you beg me to go to New York with you if you did not care back? Why did you not push me away when I kissed you?!”

The ringing. The yelling. My fingers tightened in my hair. Interrogation. Blueprint of The Met spread out on a dark table in a dark room. Five officers and Mrs. Barbour hanging on my answers. Me, too important. Me. I didn’t do anything. Innocent. Not my fault.

“I practically ran to New York after you! I chased your bird around the world! Look at me!!” My hands were yanked away from my head. His hands gripped my wrists, and I couldn’t look anywhere but into his face.

A heartbeat. The space between his flushed lips, the glint of too-perfect, too-white teeth. The ringing in my ears, the white noise in my brain.

I kissed him.

It would be stupid to tell you, whoever’s reading, (I almost hope nobody does) that I’d never been kissed before. But fuck, did that feel like the first time. He kept my wrists firmly in his grip, my fingers curling around the air on either side of my swimming head. His lips parted, my lips welcomed it. His tongue touched mine in the cavern we’d created of our mouths. He tasted of smoke, wine, smelled of sweat and the cologne I couldn’t place. I realize, now, he put it on just for me, for the day we'd shared.

His hands released me, only until they found purchase by holding my jaw and my temples, fingertips in my hair, pushing my glasses off my nose to bump and smear against his forehead. And he was fucking _grunting._ A sound I’d heard before his voice dropped a near octave, when we clumsily grasped at each other, rubbed and humped, feeling like we were the only ones in the world alone in the desert. I moaned back into his mouth, dragging my teeth over his tongue, hoping to whatever fucking god there was that it’d do the same thing to him that his voice did to me.

It probably worked too well.

“Ahng…” He moaned as our lips parted, just enough space for my glasses to finally fall to my foot and clatter under the bed. I needed him so fucking bad it hurt. I needed him more than any drug, more than any alcohol, more than my painting. More than 10 years since we shared a bed. Call it what he wanted, I needed it. My quivering hands fell to his chest, unbuttoning the remainder of his shirt.

“Hah. Oh ho, I see,” he panted, licking his lips, watching me. “Is this still not making us lovers?”

“Shut the fuck up,” I snapped, earning a laugh in return. When the final button was released, Boris shrugged from his shirt. Pale, covered in sinewy hills and valleys of muscle. A plethora of dark, curled hair from chest, and under his arms, down his stomach, abdomen, plunging beneath the waist of his jeans where he was (very clearly) showing his excitement. I felt my neck burn under my collar.

“Is this a gun, or am I happy to see you?” He rocked his hips teasingly at me. I nearly died on the spot.

“Nobody says that,” I tore my eyes away, glancing toward the black television screen. “And you’re saying it wrong, stupid.”

He sensed the fear and apprehension in my voice, the sharp words directed at him not playful this time. “Hey,” he stepped forward, closer, placing a hand gently on the curve between my neck and shoulder, making me shiver. “It’s just me, Potter. I missed you, and I want you, but if you don’t want it we don’t have to.”

What the fuck was I supposed to say to that? Of course I wanted him. I had for years, and I was only able to have him in my memories and dreams. I simply unbuttoned my own shirt as he watched. I’d become lightly toned from swimming twice every week and cutting sugar from my diet, though not nearly as thin as I had been at 15 living on what we could steal and what Xandra brought home from the bar.

Both of us now men, but still greedy like boys for each other.

His hands smoothed over my chest and shoulders as he pushed the shirt away from my body. “You grew up so beautiful,” he murmured, leaning in to kiss the space between my jaw and neck. I was powerless to stop it, and simply sighed with pleasure in return.

His hands gently ran down my arms, feeling the muscles that had built there from swimming the breaststroke. I was scared to hear him call me that. I’d heard people describe me as handsome, put-together, scholarly, business-smart, but never beautiful.

I wanted to put my shirt back on. Guilt and shame coiled in me. What would people say if they found out about this? Why did I care? This was what I wanted in a deeper part of myself that I rarely acknowledged; one that I had kept buried under Pippa, Kitsey, and women looking to cheat on their husbands. A truth too terrifying to understand. One that my father would have beat me for, one that the boys in middle school had terrorized me for.

“Potter?”

I blinked, not realizing I had been staring into nothing, lost in my head. I tilted my vision back to him.

“Did you hear me? I said you are beautiful.” Tender, sincere. His hands had fallen to hold mine. Cold, soft hands.

“Nobody’s ever called me that before.”

“You went lost in your head. Where did you go?”

I couldn’t say. It was the blackout curtain that shrouded everything; the layer of dust and rubble that covered anything remotely happy in my life. The ruins of the museum hiding any seeds that would have sprouted into a healthy part of my brain through adolescence to blossom when I became a man.

“You know this is not wrong, don’t you?”

No, I didn’t. All my life, at least the parts I remember, I’ve been told it was disgusting. The boys who sexually assaulted me in middle school because they thought I looked gay, my father who scowled at men holding hands at the MGM Grand when out to dinner. It was funny, my mother always told me I could be whoever I was happiest being, that whoever I ended up loving would be right. But to a boy whose mind was delicate and broken, who lost everything bright in an instant, any negativity snuffed out my mother’s words of encouragement and support.

“Potter,” he touched my chin, bringing my sight back up to his face. His eyes were dark as night, though his pupils reflected just a little less light, a truer shade of black. They were blown from his fading high and obvious arousal. “We’ve done wrong things, yes. But this? This is not one of them.”

Silence. What could I say to that? Nothing came to my mind, all choked beneath rubble and trauma.

“Tee-oh?”

I blinked. I was jarred by his voice, and immediately snapped back into the present moment. No Potter. Theo. “What did you call me?”

“Tee-oh. Your name. Tee-oh!”

Despite myself, in direct opposition to the pain in my head, the anxiety under my ribs, I began to laugh like a last rush of Blow was coming to a head. “My name’s not Tee-oh, you bastard.”

“Yes it is! You’re the bastard! Tee-oh!”

I shoved him in the chest like a boy, and he shoved me back hard enough that my back landed against the downy mattress before I even realized it. “Hah! Got you, asshole! Bastard! Tee-oh!”A jingle of his belt coming undone, the low groan of a zipper. I lifted my head in time to see the blurred figure of him pull down his pants– no underwear, no surprise to me.

What did surprise me was he was definitely not the lanky, skinny kid I used to know in any sense of those words anymore. I watched him as he stepped out of his pants, scratching his balls. “I like Potter better,” I told him, “but only from you.”

“Me too. You are my Potter. Magic, nerdy boy.” He sat beside me on the mattress. There was something terribly and wonderfully familiar about being back in bed with him.

“I’m not nerdy, you fucker,” I removed my belt, pants and underwear. With astounding self-control, or tender affection, he only watched my eyes.

“You are. Knowledgeable about old furniture. Who does that? And big glasses. You are nerd.” A bright smile, prosthetic teeth reflecting like pearls in the lamp light. “But I like it; always have.”

“You talk too much, you know that?”

A sly smile. “What would you have me do instead?”

Boris was infuriating sometimes. Always a cat, playing with a world full of mice. “You know what.” I stared at him, hoping, praying, that he could still read my thoughts as well as he could when we were not yet men. I didn’t have the ability or courage to say it out loud.

Thankfully, he could. “Lubricant? Rubbers?”

I loved the way his tongue curled around those Rs. I gestured vaguely to my weekender bag. It didn’t take him long to find my quart-sized ziplock of liquids, or the little bottle of KY and two condoms. He returned with them, clasped in pale fingers adorned with gold rings. “We never used condoms before,” I said.

“Well, before we were never with anyone else. Virgins,” he told me, tearing open a Durex with his pearly teeth and spitting the foil onto the ground. “Who knows what kind of fucked up shit we got since then?” He was right, of course. I hadn’t gone to the doctor for anything since I lived with the Barbours. Besides a fucked brain, they’d find a narcotics addict with a bouquet of possible STDs.It was fine, really, and I liked watching Boris slide the latex sheath over his uncut dick.

He caught me looking and was clearly thrilled about it. “A few things have changed, hah?”

I slipped my condom over myself, now fully hard, while he watched. “You’re even hairier than I remember.”

“Like a bear!” He snarled and dove into bed playfully like he was jumping into our Las Vegas pool, and tackled me.

For a moment, we were boys again. We wrestled, laughed. His hands were everywhere and his black curls in my vision. I’d grown taller than him, and for once in my life I found the advantage. I pushed him under my body, pinned his shoulders down into the mattress. I straddled him, felt him breathing between my thighs, watched his antique black glass eyes stare back at me. My cock twitched with arousal against his stomach.

There was stillness, only the sound of our breathing, the hum of electric lights, the whisper of rain. “Beautiful…” He whispered, reaching out to touch my cheek.

Three words sweet on the tip of my tongue. Unable to speak them, I leaned down to kiss his lips. I could feel only him, the heat of his mouth, his tongue tangling with mine. His hands were everywhere, bitten nubs of fingernails trying to cling to me as if he’d be washed away with only me to anchor him. I felt differently about him. Boris was both the ship that was able to float me on top of the bullshit of my life, and the stormy ocean threatening to wash me away to the point of no return.

But was there even anything worth returning to if he wasn’t with me?

Lips broke with a soft crackle of saliva. “You said you been thinking of us. Please,” he whispered into my lips, “tell me your fantasy– the one you never told another soul…”

He was my ship on the rough sea, the stormy waves, and a torrential wind who blew away the rubble of my past, exposing the things I’d only indulge in privately that were buried underneath addiction, depression and anxiety. The most powerful force in my life, with the power to chase away nightmares and terror, the power to give comfort to someone who so rarely felt it.

My fantasy? In reality, I would be alone in my bed, frame made of mahogany pieces of Queen Anne and Bernhardt smashed together with new hand-planed wood. On my knees, chest to my mattress, I thrust into the hand I’d slicked with lotion, moaning his name into my pillow.

In my mind, I was always between his thighs, moaning his name into his fragrant neck. He’d yell for me back, holding me close as we kissed. When I’d finished, my hand would be wet with cum, and my pillow with where I’d imagined I’d been kissing him. Heartbreaking, when I would wake from my daydream and he’d never be there.

“I want to fuck you…”

I tasted him murmur words I couldn’t understand into my mouth before he kissed me again, tongue diving into my mouth to find mine again. It was the only conformation I needed, though he bucked his hips up into mine, just for extra reassurance.

I blindly reached for the lube as we kissed harder, teeth clacking together as we became more and more desperate. I was suddenly thankful for the first time for the homosexual porn I'd watched and read in incognito browsers; at least it had taught me how to do this correctly. I never thought it would happen beyond my private fantasy.

He let me stop kissing him long enough for me to settle between his snow-white thighs, dotted with scars from the past. Knees over my shoulders, ankles crossed behind my head. Boris waited only long enough for me to pour lube over my fingers before he pulled me back into a bruising kiss. He always had been affectionate, I remembered with a rush the words I was trying not to think about and swallowed them back down.

The condoms were self-lubricated, but I was sure it wasn’t enough for the tight hole that wasn’t evolutionarily made for this. My fingers, dripping with lube, hovered between us with uncertainty. “Please,” he whimpered. A weak desperation I’d never heard from him, and somehow knew I was the only one who he trusted enough to show it to.

I pushed my index finger past his crimped ring of muscle, earning a passionate moan and a breathtaking show of him pressing his head back into the pillows. His black hair splayed around his head like a dark halo, eyelashes fluttering in bliss. I worked him gently, thrusting in and out, trying my best to coat his walls. As I pushed my middle finger in with more resistance, earning another mewling groan, I was thankful that his entrance felt different than a woman’s. Where a vagina compressed around my fingers as deep as they went, Boris had a single tight ring that squeezed hard around me with him. I felt like I was being sucked into his body. He was different, and it was absolutely thrilling. I didn’t think I could have sex with a woman ever again already. How had I ever pretended I liked females more than this?

“M-more,” Boris gasped, one hand in my hair and the other splayed over my back. He was murmuring in Polish, and gasped when I pushed a third finger in. The sound of his moans and the slick sound of my fingers pushing in and out was almost enough for me to fill my condom prematurely. I fought against myself. I couldn’t help but think for some reason that it would be my one and only night with him. I couldn’t ruin it by orgasming too fast like a teenaged boy.

“I need your dick, Potter,” he said, inky eyes opening to look at me, “I have been waiting years,” fingers tightened in my hair. “All this time, we had matching fantasy for each other. We wasted so much time. You could have been fucking me instead of fucking ladies. It pisses me off, thinking of all those ladies you fucked. Your too-pretty ex. I’m jealous.” His cheeks were flushed red, curls pasted to his glistening forehead, a wild quality to him that I’d roused. Hands moved to hold my face, his vision all I could see. “I want you, and you alone. Do you hear me? Life is too short not to have you with me.”

I felt the same. Kotku in Vegas who took him away from me, the thought of him making babies with his ex-wife, it all had made me so angry and sickeningly envious. “I always thought of you,” I said before I thought of what I was admitting. “Every fucking time I was in bed with someone else, I thought of you. I couldn’t help it. I–”

He pulled me in for a crushing kiss. I grunted in pain as my lips pinched between our teeth, and I tasted the metallic tang of blood. I held my slicked cock, lined up with his prepped asshole, and pushed inside.

The resulting moan was the most delicious I’d ever heard, so loud I was sure every neighboring room could hear. For the first time in my life, I didn’t fucking care. I thrust into him with abandon, moaning his name and grunting just as loud. The mattress joined in the chorus as we writhed together, the wet slap of skin on skin for percussion.

There were no drugs I could take, no priceless artifact I could own, no amount of money I could have, that would make me feel as blissful as he did. Somewhere in my white-hot thoughts, my nerves screaming, I was keenly aware that this beat out every fucking fantasy I’d ever had of this night I was sure would never come.

“Nngh! Aangh!” The pressure around my cock was suddenly crushing and Boris froze as he screamed. His had legs spread in the air on either side of my head, feet tensing and toes curling. I watched the devastatingly gorgeous orgasm on his face. Mouth wide open, lips swollen. Eyelids trembling and wet. It was then that mine caught up to me in a blast, and all I could feel was pleasure in the purest form, like nothing I had ever hoped or thought possible.

I collapsed beside him, trembling and gasping for air after I fell back to our planet. “My God…” Boris groaned beside me, rolling over to hold me in his arms. I held him back, clinging to him as he did to me. “So good, Potter,” he nuzzled my jaw lazily, “better than any dream I ever had…”

A kiss, chaste, tender and romantic. Our lips moved slowly as hands caressed each other’s slick, naked skin. We’d changed so much since adolescence, he felt familiar but so different in manhood, and I was sure it was the same for him and my body. Would we only have tonight or forever to memorize the new muscles, freckles and scars?

“It feels like we are the only ones in the world,” he whispered. I wouldn’t have heard him over the rain if he hadn’t been so close. “It always feels too big until I am alone with you.”

“I know…” He read my very thoughts. Here, our universe. So perfect, so gorgeous, so far away from even my own judgement.

In my clarity of mind, anxious debris was washed away by his tenderness and affection, the words I’d always wanted to tell him were all I could think and feel. Like a spotlight beaming down on a soloist on stage. A single melody, a single thought.

“Boris?” I whispered, returning to reality. However, he was asleep, breathing steadily against my chest. I’d been lost in my mind for much longer than I realized. So I closed my eyes as well and pressed my nose into his hair.

_I love you._


	3. Chapter 3

In the morning, I found the bed empty, watery light pouring in through the window. I panicked for only a moment before seeing through my blurred vision that Boris’ clothes were still crumpled on the ground, exactly where we had left them. The sound of the shower hissing. I sighed and pressed my face into the pillow.

There was no way to avoid talking about it now. Yesterday I told him truthfully at dinner that my flight back to New York was a red eye; that we would be able to spend another day together. What I hadn’t expected (but admittedly hoped) was that he would spend the night and we’d participate in acts together that had previously only existed in my most private of dreams. He was sexy, gorgeous, both gentle and rough…

And I was still in love with him after all these years. For nearly half of my life, and he was the one to who my heart truly belonged… But why did it have to be this way?

It had been so easy with Kitsey. She said we were a smart match, convenient and meant to be in so many ways but for the right ones, namely love. With her, my life was planned out. She had status, I made astounding money in my trade. I’d get her pregnant once every few years, we’d send our children to the best schools money could buy, and I’d die a slow death at every socialite fundraiser and function I was forced to attend with her on my arm, eating our meals prepared by our house staff on the robin’s egg blue Tiffany plates she’d picked out and placed on our wedding registry.

And Pippa… well, at least she was a woman.

What came selfishly to my mind first was how strange it would be to show up to dinner at the Barbours’ with Boris. He practically came from another planet in comparison. I felt defensive and anxious about how the night would play out. I would have to defend Boris against their judging eyes and questions while hoping to god an unfavorable topic didn’t come up. (What did you and Theo like to do when you were kids? What do you do for a living?) How would I be able to bridge the gap between two worlds? He’d stuck out noticeably at the engagement party. The groom’s friend. Not one of their kind.

Although, according to Pippa, Boris’ only concern that night had been the groom. Years after that night, but only a few months ago, I sat across from Pippa and her swollen tummy at a cafe on Greenwich she likes, but one I’d only ever stopped in for a cardboard cup with space for half and half to go and a newspaper. I was trying my damndest to be a good friend and be happy for her and her condition, be a normal person without traumatic obsessions and force myself to realize that yes, children were something that were desirable to people our age in stable relationships– which she was.

She seemed shy talking about herself so much when I had nothing really to talk about. Of course, I had my travels, but I never did anything fun or adventurous on them but reflect and write. I only stayed long enough to buy back the pieces I’d sold counterfeit, ship them back to New York, and then fly back myself. “Well,” she asked, “have you been seeing anyone?”

I felt heat flare up in me defensively. Why did she, of all people, have to ask me that? Because we’re friends now, I harshly reminded myself. The ring on her finger and the infant in her womb assured that we wouldn’t ever be anything more. Ever. “No,” I gave her a smile, squinting through the sunlight beaming in the window beside our table, “too busy.”

“Really?” She seemed genuinely surprised. “I guess I thought… well, at the engagement party…”

A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. “You can’t mean Kitsey.”

“No! No, God no,” she laughed too, holding her mug of herbal tea. “I mean Boris.”

“Boris?” Automatically, I coughed back a scoff. Without thinking, I defensively pushed away whatever she may have assumed about me, no matter how correct she may be. A hairline trigger I had beaten and shoved into me in a middle school locker room. “No, absolutely not,” I told Pippa firmly and took a sip of my coffee, trying to hide the heat crawling up my neck.

“Oh?” Why was this all a mystery to her? I’d told her, a woman, that I was in love with her through pen and paper just a few years previous. And I, a man, had been in a heterosexual betrothal to a woman. “I’m sorry I assumed. He just talked about you so highly that night… and you both ran off with each other so suddenly, and after that a wedding invitation never came.”

Shit. Was that what people thought? I hadn’t realized in my frantic mind (busy with thoughts of jumping a plane to Amsterdam to rescue a priceless piece of art) what running out on my fiancee at my own engagement party would look like, with another man, no less. I pushed my fingers under my glasses and groaned into my palms. With how rumors spread around Kitsey’s scene, Theodore Decker, the queer that almost got Kitsey Barbour, was spread all over New York to countless clients of mine in no uncertain terms. “ _I always knew it,”_ is what Tom Cable would have said to this news with an infuriating scoff.

Pippa reached across the table for my hand. “Boris… he kept asking if I knew Kitsey, and if I thought you deserved her. I had to tell him the truth, that I had never met her before but she seemed nice enough… And he watched you the whole time. He had this sad, longing look… one that I see Hobie make when looking at pictures of Welty.”

I looked into my coffee. It was something that everyone knew, but wasn’t spoken of much. It wasn’t a topic I was much interested in, to tell the truth, one that made me uncomfortable in a way I couldn’t explain, one that even prompted me to stop writing him at age 15 when Boris himself had called him an ‘old poofter.’ “I had a feeling that you were angry at him for some reason, but it was like when him and Hobie would have an argument, and they still looked at each other like they treasured what they saw…” Pippa said. I could feel that she had been trying to talk to me about this for a long time but was never able to bring it up, perhaps because she knew I would act like a jackass about it. The shame crawled out of the collar of my shirt to burn in my cheeks, and the conversation dropped.

But I couldn’t ignore it now. The things he told me the night before, the things I admitted back, they couldn’t be taken away, and I couldn’t lie. Not to him. Somewhere deep in my soul, the things I thought and felt were the honest to god truth. I never yearned for him like I yearned for the number of women I had been with, or anyone else, before or since.

Beyond the thin wall separating the sleeping area from the bathroom, I heard singing. Ukrainian, I guessed. His voice had lowered to a gorgeous bass that made goosebumps rise over my naked body. A beckoning siren call I call that I couldn’t ignore, drawing me toward my final fate. I stood, and wandered to the bathroom door.

We’d showered together as boys (on the rare occasion we felt the need to wash) so hungover we were puking down the drain and letting the cold water wash away the stale sweat, chlorine and desert dust that had accumulated over our bodies. As Boris sat slumped under the spray, I washed his body with Xandra’s coconut vanilla soap. His ribs were visible through his bruised, malnourished skin. His hip bones poked through on either side of where black curls surrounded his limp dick to match the curls on his head. What I didn’t tell him last night was that I had similar fascination for his body back then. I liked seeing him naked where I hadn’t thought much about seeing girls our age.

Gently, I tried the door handle. Unlocked, but I found myself unable to push the door open. He wanted me to come in… but the part of me who kept the sensitive parts of me guarded wouldn’t allow it. They’d built up to shield the childish heart who’d lost his mother and protect him from a world who didn’t love him, from abuse and neglect from his father. The anxiety that had failed to protect me like it should before instead morphed into paranoia, and it told me if I opened that door my fate would be sealed. I would be what it was trying so hard to tell me I wasn’t.

I lied to hurt others, and I lied to hurt myself.

Instead, I found myself needing to flee. I scribbled a note to Boris promising I would be back soon, dressed myself, found my glasses under the bed, and ran without brushing my teeth, looking in a mirror or running a comb through my hair.

I avoided the eyes of the hotel staff and hurried out into the bright, rain-fragrant morning. The sun nearly blinded me, causing a headache to burst through my sinuses. It had been a long time since I’d inhaled so much of anything, or felt so much emotion at once. One truth blazed like the sun in the east, and I was unable to hide it from myself– I was in love with him.

If he had only been a woman… but he wouldn’t be Boris anymore, would he? The way he moved through the world, all of the things that attracted me to him, they were because he was a man like me. If I loved Boris, if I was attracted to him… I was a homosexual.

My feet followed the water’s edge, reflecting the buildings and sky around it. Two swans floated on the glassy surface, necks entwined with each other. I’d read an article once that researchers had discovered that it was actually quite common for male swans to mate for life with each other, even going so far as to steal eggs from females so they could raise young together. My father’s voice in my head automatically dismissed it as liberal, disgusting, lying bullshit. Being with another man wasn’t natural, and it was a human construct thought up by perverts.

But being with Boris felt so natural, so easy, it was as if part of my soul resided in his body. The night previous wasn’t as confusing as my mind wanted it to believe, and I knew it. I enjoyed it. I wanted to do it again. I wanted to keep him as mine… I just wish that the labels didn’t need to come with it. The feelings I had for him were clear now, but the fear was always present.

A small shop with tables near the lake promised espresso and bagels. As I approached, people glanced at me with widened eyes before looking to their friends or down into their phones. Disgust. Shame. Judgement. They knew what I did, all of them. They saw right through me into the most private part of my soul. A scarlet “A” sewn onto the breast of my jacket. I pressed on, trying to ignore them and the fiery bile that burned in my throat at the shame I felt in their eyes. I walked to the counter and glanced to the teenaged girl behind the counter tapping away on her cell before I looked up to the menu. Dutch, the language that would always haunt me.

She gasped so suddenly I felt myself jump. _“Gaat het wel goed?”_ She asked me urgently, reaching for a clean towel.

“Huh?” I swallowed the terror down, throat bobbing above the knot in my necktie. “I’m sorry, I don’t–“

“Blood,” she responded after she had wet the towel in the sink. She gestured to her lips, under a nostril.

“Shit,” I murmured as I realized, covering my own nose with my hand and taking the wet cloth from her. The coke last night, the crushing kiss and the iron taste after. I wiped my lip, my nose, and pulled the white cotton back to look. It was rusted, like it had been dry for hours. A laugh escaped me in relief. That’s why people had stared…

“Are you alright?” She asked me as she took the rag back. “Do you need a doctor?” She had a pretty little accent, bright as the morning outside, and I couldn’t help but smile. It seemed to make her feel better, too.

“No no,” I chuckled, “just coffee.”

On the way out with two large paper cups of coffee and a bag of egg sandwiches (on things that I might have called bagels if I didn’t know better) I walked back to the hotel. I loved a man. We had done things that I would never (at the time) admit to another soul. The weight of such a secret in my chest was so heavy and electric that I thought I may burst at the revelation. How many others carried such secrets? The woman passing on a rattling single-speed bicycle. The small group of asian tourists. The 9 men on a long rowboat slicing through the water. I longed to know their secrets to distract from the weight of my own.

Arriving back in the room I found Boris with a cigarette and newspaper, lounging in a chair beside the window while wearing a hotel bathrobe and my pair of pajama pants. He gave gave me a smile, tapping ashes into the tray beside him. My heart lurched at the beauty of it. “You did not feel like a shower this morning?”

He must have heard me turn the knob earlier. “No, I needed coffee first,” I said, only half true. A pang in my chest. With this, with him, I needed to be truthful. If I needed to be true to anyone, it was him. We were both liars, and that was fine with me. But I didn’t want it to be with each other. “… That’s not right. I got scared,” I murmured, placing a cup of coffee and a sandwich beside the ashtray. I tapped a cigarette out of his pack for myself before sitting across from him.

“Scared?” His dark eyes flashed in light that only glittered so brightly the morning after something so fantastic. His black curls were limp from washing and hanging around his face like summer ivy. He’d shaved (with my razor, I’m sure) and his face was so breathtaking and smooth, lips so inviting, my _David_ cast in warm flesh and soul. “Is just me, Potter,” he reached for my hand, and I let him take it, “there is nothing to fear.” 

His hands were warm from showering. “I’m not scared of you,” I murmured.

“Then of what?” He rubbed his thumb over my knuckles, comforting, coaxing.

The only word I could think of was _appearances._ I had wanted to marry Kitsey because it looked good, her and I. It made Mrs. Barbour happy, and Kitsey was beautiful and rich, of old New York money. Theodore and Kitsey Decker, they were people to trust with our antiques business. What if people saw me walking hand-in-hand with Boris on the way to grab a sandwich at the deli? Would there be negative repercussions for the Barbours for being Kitsey’s ex-fiance? “Um…” I knew the question wouldn’t be graceful, but I needed to ask it. “Are you a homosexual?”

Boris didn’t flinch, or laugh, or push it away like I would have. Instead, he pursed his lips together in thought, still clasping my hand. “I do like sleeping with women, but not as much as I like sleeping with you. You are also, still, the only man I have ever been with,” he shrugged, “I have never thought about it.”

How could he just not think about it? It made me feel like my identity was crumbling around me.

It, once upon a time, had been easy enough to pretend like I was one when an insecure gay man came strolling into the shop looking for a piece for his and his partner’s new Manhattan high-rise. I could tell right away, he wasn’t hiding anything though he was trying. I’d use the same story, using subtle hints that I was in the same boat as him, masquerading for that moment until money crossed our hands that I had a partner too, and I’d met him in this very shop. He had ink-black eyes and matching curled hair. We’d fallen madly in love. We lived together just a few blocks away. His name was Boris.

But the night before was real. He was real, in front of me, sipping the coffee I’d bought him and unwrapping a sandwich to place in front of me. “You feel better if you eat,” he told me, reaching into the bag for his own. He scoffed at the thin bun with a hole in the center. “They call this bagel?”

I couldn’t help but smile. “That’s what I thought too.”

“Much better in New York,” but he took a generous bite anyway with his veneered teeth.

Silence fell between us. Sips of coffee, sighs of smoke, crumpling paper as we ate the food we desperately needed. It was strange, the year we spent together in Nevada molded the men we became. I could count on both hands the number of times we had a proper meal together, just the two of us, that one of us had honestly paid for. Now here we were, the morning after something that had been inevitable. I was so confused, so terrified. But Boris was so comfortable with himself. He always said he had a good life, and he played the cards he’d been dealt in his life with more grace than I’d played mine. The way he flourished was blinding.

“And you?” He asked, pulling me out of my spiraling mind.

“Me?” I asked stupidly into my coffee, steam fogging my glasses.

“Are you homosexual?” He smashed the paper his sandwich had been in into a tight ball.

“No,” I answered quietly. “No… I never. Only with you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he sucked a drop of sunshine-colored yolk from his thumb, not meeting his eyes. “I meant what I said.” I simply rose an eyebrow, prompting him to continue. “Last night in bed. I meant it.”

“We said a lot,” I told him. I couldn’t meet his eyes, but watched as he shifted his chair closer to mine to sit in front of me so our knees touched.

“Life is too short not to have you in my life, every day by my side,” when I didn’t lift my head to look into his vision, he touched my jaw to coax me to.

“Boris…” I squeezed my eyes shut, heart aching. “We can’t. You know we can’t…”

“Why not?” He demanded, voice growing more urgent. “Give me reason why. We can do whatever we want.”

“I have to stay with Hobie,” I told him honestly. “I’m still buying back the counterfeits I sold.”

“And I tell you years ago I will pay double what you make with the old poofter,” he was cupping my cheek now, the other hand on my knee as I sat limply under his touch, looking toward my coffee cup. “You would be unbeatable with me. Invaluable. You like selling fakes to people, what about the real deal too?”

I couldn’t help but lift my eyes to look at him. The smirk that followed my glance made me very aware that he knew he’d piqued my interest. “Paintings. Sculpture. Gold. Artifacts. These hands have touched more priceless art in deals than most people working for museums, and I get much more money.”

I remembered Horst in New York, those fantastic paintings hanging on his walls given to him by rich kids (plucked from their parents’ private collections) in exchange for drugs. The old feeling of when I had _The Goldfinch_ twisted in my chest. Immortality. Greater than just any other human. My life had felt less fantastic than it did when I thought it rested asleep in the storage unit. He smiled wider, knowing my thoughts like he always did. “I make your fantasy come true last night… I can make more real, _kotyonek_. Together, the world is ours.” His face was so close I could smell sleep and coffee on his breath. His eyes were flashing, a manic sort of quality in his smile.

With Boris, life would have no plan. No path. No expectations for children and careers and retirement and then death. It would just be us, spiraling. Drugs, passion, danger, art, and (dare I say?) love. Collapsing together in hotel rooms around the world, standing together strong, foreheads pressed together during triumph, endless excitement, dark and dank clubs where he sat on my lap and drank, talking Ukranian fast as he planned our next moves. Yes, this is the blood of my heart, closer than brothers, he’d introduce us, my soulmate. In love since adolescence, only death shall separate us until we find each other beyond again. Never one without the other.

The life he led was dangerous and fast, he wasn’t meant to become an old man, and he knew it. I rose my hand to hold his arm, feeling the raised bumps of needle tracks on his bruised flesh. Darling boy… if I gave myself over wholeheartedly, I would lose him, or he would lose me, and it would destroy the other. I could only think of Gyuri mourning endlessly for his lost more-than-brother. The pain in his heart, waiting to meet him again on the other side of the gate. But was there even such a thing?

His lips brushed mine, and I felt him breathing into my mouth. Gentle nuzzling over my unshaved cheeks, inhaling and exhaling the same air. The touch so loving and intimate, it made me dizzy along with my racing thoughts.

“Please…”

He’d been practicing his English to tell me the things he felt, but he didn’t need to. Like that final night in Las Vegas, we both knew. What was in my heart then and now never faded. Never died. It was here, reflecting in his. He didn’t need to say it, and neither did I. We knew.

The promise of a short but exciting life. Riches. Love. Wonder. Terror. Loss. I’d never survive the loss if Boris was taken too soon from me, from this world, no matter what else I had. Mrs Barbour suffering alone in her bed, never leaving, frail and skin yellowed from lack of sun and a shattered life. Never to recover, never to be happy again…

“I can’t…”

I felt him pull away and my head dropped, unable to look at him. Terrified. I was a broken man, shields thick, anxiety around the damaged heart of a 13 year old boy who was afraid to love anyone as genuinely and eternally as he loved his mother, taken from him in a flash.

Boris pulled away just after he began to tremble. The silence and stress made my ears ring, and my hands rose up to hold my head, too full of possibilities and thoughts. “Why,” he murmured, “why are you afraid of being happy?”

I didn’t have an answer for him. My headache was growing more painful, I felt myself cracking around the edges, a man made of porcelain.

“You nearly marry a lady who you don’t love, you tell me you are unhappy with your life. I offer you the best life I can think of, one that makes me happy. A good life! But here you are, now,” I could hear his throat tightening around his words and I couldn’t bear to look at him, “and I know you are happy with me. I feel your heart against mine. Why do you do this?”

Because I’m weak. Afraid. Broken. At the most tender point in my life, I was blown apart and none of the pieces were put back together how they should be. I could hear the shuffling of clothes through screaming thoughts and tinnitus, and I was powerless to stop him.

A click, the lock being released. “Don’t ever say I didn’t try.” A slam. Silence.

I felt there was a pretty good chance it was the last I’d see of him.


	4. Chapter 4

The first rule of restorations: never do what you can’t undo.

I thought I’d done that on Christmas Eve in Amsterdam, my mother smiling gently at me from the mirror at the foot of my bed. She’d come to collect me so we could be together again, like I was sure she collected Andy when he arrived at that far-off shore from ocean he’d drowned in.

Until Boris dragged me back.

I remember my body forcibly dragged away from my mother, and she smiled, turned, and the light she walked away into was blinding. In my vision, blurred and not quite real, I saw him, only barely registering the terror in his face as he forced my eye open with his thumb. My soul was apart from my body, hanging on by a thread.

My limp body over his smaller one, struggling with my weight, collapsing with him to the cold bathroom tile. The grout still vaguely smelled like the toothpaste I’d used to try and remove the blood that had dripped from my clothes a handful of nightmarish evenings before. “Drink,” he begged me, forcing a glass of lukewarm tap water at my lips, “please, drink!”

I’d never heard fear in his voice like that before– what choice did I have but to obey? I forced my raw throat to swallow, swallow, each a struggle, the drips falling down my chin and neck feeling as big as rivers. Hauled to my knees by my shoulders, I felt his chest against my back. Solid, intimate. Had he always been so warm? Had I always been so cold?

Fingers forcing my mouth apart, fingers plunging down my throat. The most burning, painful, acidic vomit I’d ever had, like I’d guzzled nothing but lemon juice the night before. Worse, it was gin, vodka, white wine, a bottle of aspirin, and the oxys I had left New York with meant for an emergency. “Good boy,” Boris gasped, rubbing my back firmly, “good boy… All up. Get it all up.”

My consciousness began blinking in and out, black to white. Somehow I was walking, all of my weight on Boris and none on my own feet. Dragging, dragging, pain… I wanted to die. It would be so much easier than putting one foot in front of the other. Why couldn’t he just let me fucking die? Why did he keep dragging me, grunting with effort, putting one foot in front of the other when I could no longer?

“I’ll never forgive you if you leave me,” he panted as he paced with me though the frozen sunrise, my ankles freezing as snow pushed between my socks from stumbling. “Don’t you fucking die, Potter. Please.”

Please, please. He chanted like a mantra. A prayer not unlike those he must have said when he was known Badr al-Dine. Please, please, please.

Like the moon, he shines wherever he goes.

Please, please, please. Don’t die.

I leaned against the cool tile, thinking back on that day, as hot water poured down my naked body, the night before trickling down the drain.

When I was a child in a world where my mother was dead, where my father didn’t love me, where no adult cared about me, there was Boris. I’d lost my mother, I lost any hope for any semblance of hope for normal happiness in life, but that didn’t mean what happiness I did manage to find mattered any less.

I thought back to the memoir saved on my laptop (ready for query if I ever worked up the courage) a short way away in my leather briefcase beside the bed. In a spout of wisdom and deep thought, pondering him at 35,000 feet, I’d written _“we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We don’t get to choose the people we are.”_ Boris had always been so gracefully himself, accepted himself, lived the exact life he wanted to live. He never complained that he didn’t have what I would call a normal life. He was happy… An unloved boy, a beaten boy, a drug addict, an alcoholic. He’d pushed past these things that could have killed him, and found his own happiness. Live by the sword, die by the sword. I was sure he was happier than anyone making millions on Wall Street, buying their wives Tiffany every Valentine’s Day until their dying breath.

 _“It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance.”_ I’d written. Yes, I put these words to page, then into a glaring white word processor, but it was an entirely different experience to internalize and live these realizations.

My whole life was about outward appearances. Don’t look high. Don’t look like you’re stalking Pippa when you happen to run into her at a bookstore with Hobie ‘by coincidence.’” Don’t look like you’re taking a housewife wanting to be an interior decorator to the cleaner for $10K over asking price for a fake Queen Anne.

Theodore Decker had always been a smart-looking boy from unfortunate circumstances. He grew up to be an astounding business man in bespoke suits, engaged to Kitsey Barbour. Yes, that beautiful young thing. He’s a man who has it all together. A man you can trust…

But would that matter in the end? If my life winked out as my mother’s had, in a blast of smoke, an avalanche of debris that crushed her skull in, then would that all have any significance on the one life I had?

Theodore Decker was actually a depressed, terrified man with PTSD, addicted to pharmaceuticals and lying. The biggest thrill in his life was actually working while high on Oxy, pupils pinpricks, robbing people without them even knowing it. Oh, and he’s gay. Realistically, he always has been. And he is deep, _deep_ in the closet. He’d been in love with one man since adolescence and never allowed himself the joy of being loved back. Because he did love him back. He knew.

That was the person I would die as. Pathetic, sad, never as happy as I had been when my mother was alive almost 20 years ago.

If I were to die young, by the sword, I would want to do so with the one I was in love with, who was to die by the exact same blade.

My happiness was the only one that mattered. Life was short, life was terrifying and thrilling and suffering and beautiful. I wanted to spend the rest of it with him, and only him.

I had to find him, immediately, or I would lose any chance of ever seeing him again.

My calls went unanswered, my texts ignored.

The airport. I had to get to the airport. He only came to The Netherlands to see me and show me _The Goldfinch_ again. He must be on his way out of the country, at least to his apartment in Antwerp if not to somewhere where I’d never be able to guess, and then never see him again. I’d broken his heart. He thought there was no hope. As far as I knew, he never spoke to Kotku again after things ended with her. He was the kind of person who was used to cutting relationships and disappearing. He’d done it so many times, when he was young and without a choice, and when he grew and he knew that he could protect himself from the things that would destroy more painfully than drugs, alcohol and violence.

Losing a person you love never healed completely. We both knew that. I felt ashamed that he felt it from me, who swore to be by his side and protect him wordlessly as boys.

A short taxi ride to the airport felt simultaneously like the longest and shortest trip of my life. My head buzzed with thoughts. I wished for a crutch. My hand reached into my pocket for my tin, but I simply held it. I wanted to try and be sober, for no apparent reason except I was trying to be romantic. I was much more myself when I was high, but maybe the words I wanted to say if i found him would resonate deeper into his heart if was from the broken, fucked up, uncut and pure me.

I arrived, and the airport pulsed like it was alive. People moved in streams, blood through veins. International departures, boarding pass acquired. The cold but temporary panic of going through security, feeling naked in my socks with my shoes and jacket in a grey box. Hands over my head like a criminal through the x-ray scanner. Thankfully, it couldn't see my sins.

The international terminal was gigantic. Arrivals from Atlanta, departures to Bejing. Dubai, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Madrid, San Fransisco, Seoul, Sepang, Toronto, Brussels.

He’d go anywhere, and perhaps already left. The thought made my stomach lurch so hard I nearly vomited where I stood. I called, texted, searched. There was no sign of him as the minutes ticked by, transforming to hours.

I’d lost him. My flight would leave for New York in 45 minutes. I pulled my carry on bag into an empty stall and sat on the toilet lid. I snorted the last good, old-style Oxys I had. It was my only hope of coping, the only way that I could remotely accept that I’d never see him again until the high wore off somewhere over the Atlantic.

Letting my feet lead me from the men’s room, I found the gate I’d been assigned. Flight 4450 to Heathrow, then onto JFK. Thank fuck there was a bar nearby. I rose my head for just a moment, looking over the woman on her laptop with a glass of rosé. The hunched shoulders of exhausted men over glasses of their various crutches.

Among them, a head of shining onyx curls and a black leather jacket. He swirled his double vodka, neat. The hands that had touched me the night before. My heart jumped into my throat and I lost my careful composure. Fuck it all.

I hurried to him, bumping people and tables of people from different time zones. He was so close. Finally, I reached out and touched his shoulder. Boris turned, dark eyes rimmed in red catching the low light. He opened his mouth to speak, seeming not so surprised to see me.

Before he could get a word out, I kissed him, lips crushing together passionately. The first kiss we shared in front of the world, in front of an audience that could bear witness and judge. Popper never minded, and God would never tell. I felt Boris turn in his bar stool to wrap his arm around me, opposite hand pushing into my hair.

Relief flooded my senses more true and pure than any heroin I’d ever taken. It chilled the hot and painful thoughts, sank into my muscles until I melted. Boris. I never loved someone like I loved him. I never would again. He held me, and I held him while regretting our words, regretting running and cowardice. Simultaneously, we were forgiven.

The bartender cleared his throat, standing on the other side of the counter as he wiped an already spotless glass. We looked to him, not letting each other go, clinging to each other like children.

“One of these for my friend,” Boris said, tilting his head toward his glass.

“Boyfriend,” I corrected.

“Boyfriend?” Boris laughed as the bartender walked off to pour vodka into a glass. Finally, we let each other go, and I settled into the chair beside him. Our fingers stayed helplessly linked, starved for attention.

“Or partner. Whatever you want.”

“Where is this coming from?” He watched as my drink was placed on a cocktail napkin by my elbow. I couldn’t look away from him.

“I love you.”

I always loved his smile. Ever since I saw it the first time, those grey little fox-like teeth between his thin lips. But here, it was blinding. Pure happiness, a caliber I had never witnessed from him before. “I know you do.”

“And?” I asked, smiling back, savoring the feeling of his fingers in mine. They were soft, a callus was on his right pointer finger that I hadn't noticed before.

“And what?”

“Do you love me too?”

A chuckle. “You Americans! So verbal, talk so much. Do you have to hear everything? Can’t you just feel something?”

I was drowning in him. I was smiling like a fool. “Humor me.”

He turned to me, leaning in so his eyes were all I could see. “Of course I love you. There is not a day that passed since I met you that I did not love you. So much, it sometimes made me sick. Crazy, insane love. It is why I ran,”he admitted, draining the last of his drink and reaching for mine, “it was too much thinking that you would not be mine.”

“I’ve always been yours…” I watched as he motioned to the bartender to pour me a fresh vodka. He’d commandeered mine. “Come to New York with me,” I asked softly, leaning in. “There’s things I need to take care of there, I need to make sure Hobie’s taken care of before I can leave.”

“Leave?” There was a hopeful note in his voice.

“I want in,” my eyes met his. “Your job offer. I want to be with you.”

Boris finished the drink meant for me, a smile stretched to his eyes. “I always did know soulmates existed.”

I soon found out he was heading to New York anyway, the same flight as me. He said that even if I didn’t want to speak to him, he wanted to be near me and see me from a distance one last time before cutting himself loose. He always was a bit of a masochist like that.

We settled together on our business class seats. While my courage was flowing, I pulled my laptop out from my bag and pulled out the thousand page document on my word processor. My memoir. My life story, compiled from nearly twenty years of scribbling in notebooks, the back of receipts, the margins of auction brochures, napkins… “Do you want something to read?” I passed it over to him.

“What is this?” He peered at the working title on the screen, a whole page by itself.

“My entire life.” Boris’s gaze met mine, eyes wide and still swimming with drunkenness. “Something I’d only ever show you.”

It took him five days to read the whole thing. He never stopped. I would awaken at night to find him in bed next to me, naked from our lovemaking, with his face glowing as he read my life’s work. The morning he had finished, he brought me coffee from Howie’s kitchen and pulled the laptop over. “We need to change a few things, but the world needs to read your story. It is art, just like your bird.”

You’ve read it if you’re reading this. Carel Fabritius painted _The Goldfinch,_ and I wrote it. We both use an alias when we put our works into this cruel world.

So, all names have been changed to protect the innocent (even Tom Cable, but fuck that guy) and some events have been changed to suit the book better and further protect myself and those I care about. You’ve read my story, and perhaps seen the film adaptation of it (please let it be known that Ansel Elgort is much more attractive than I ever was in my 20’s. Boris said that he would like me to fuck Aneurin Barnard while he watched. I was neither shocked or surprised at his statement. We were in a theatre on 2nd avenue sharing sips from a flask, nobody knowing that the film was an adaptation of my life as I sat among them.)

When you read this, this part of me after my book has ended, I may still be alive. What I expect, however, is this to be my last love letter to him, the man you know as Boris. We live by the sword, and we die by the sword. We will die young, but at least we will die together, and we will die happy and loved.

We always were the only ones that made each other feel so alive.


End file.
